If you have a bee in your bonnet about having bee-stung lips, you might make a bee-line to the plastic surgeon. And if someone asked whether you had work done, you might well them that it’s none of their darned beeswax.
The insects that are so crucial to American agriculture–as Bryan Walsh explains in this week’s TIME Magazine–are also stalwarts in the English language. The buzzy, cute, loud, social, stinging animals have inspired a colony of metaphors and idioms over the past millennia. Some of those phrases make more obvious sense than others (we’re looking at you, bee’s knees), so TIME burrowed into the stories behind nine bee-inspired sayings.
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